Christopher Cascio
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Neuroscience
Feeling connected to other people matters for health, and it matters most during adolescence, when peer relationships take on outsized importance. Social media is now a main channel for those relationships: most teenagers use more than one platform and nearly all go online daily.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
adolescence
social media
technology and digital media
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test whether greater exposure to social media features signaling connection — likes, comments, friends and followers — sensitizes adolescents to social feedback, measured as heightened brain reactivity to social inclusion and exclusion with functional MRI.
- Track how neural reactivity to social inclusion and exclusion changes across the transition from middle school to high school, a period of shifting peer ties and increased risk-taking.
- Relate longitudinal measures of social media exposure and neural reactivity to adolescents' health and risk behaviors and well-being, using outcome data from companion projects in the larger study.
- Identify strengths as well as deficits of social media use by testing whether sensitized adolescents benefit more from experiences of social inclusion, not only suffer more from exclusion.
More about the research
Whether this helps or harms well-being is genuinely unsettled — reviews find positive, negative and null results. One reason for the mixed picture may be that effects depend on how a teen uses these platforms and on how sensitive that teen has become to social feedback.
Why it matters
Adolescents spend much of their social life online, and parents, schools and clinicians lack evidence on which patterns of use help and which harm. By identifying whether sensitivity to social feedback explains why the same platforms benefit some teens and hurt others, this work could point toward concrete guidance on steering young people toward forms of online engagement linked to better well-being and healthier behavior, rather than blanket limits on screen time.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
William Mellick
Medical University of South Carolina, SC·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test whether parents with alcohol use disorder plus bipolar disorder and their unaffected teens show stronger brain responses to reward than AUD-only families, using fMRI during social reward and decision-making tasks.
Jasmin Cloutier
University of Delaware, DE·Psychology
Compare brain activity, measured with functional MRI, while people form first impressions of human versus artificial intelligence (AI) partners.
Madhukar Trivedi
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Investigate how the amount of social media use and positive or negative online experiences affect depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation trajectories over six months in 100 at-risk Texas youth.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
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